Impact of Cycle Time on Customer Facing Enterprise Mobile and Web Applications

With support from Dave van Reese.
Enterprises inspired by Agile and Lean startups often embark on mobile and web projects only to be disappointed. Although they faithfully implement many Lean practices, entrenched processes elongate cycle times and can dampen the benefits.

This article examines the negative impact of delivering large releases infrequently, techniques for shortening cycle times and the benefits associated with success.

Common Enterprise Malfunction

The impact of compliance, IT and business-approval processes and multiple stakeholders in complex organizations results in a development cycle that is typically prolonged.

Long-term cycle times have widespread effects:

Unreliable release dates and departments that are untrusting of others

Customer experience does not evolve fast enough because learnings trickle in slowly

Unclear impact of any given change because too many features were deployed

A learning environment does not take hold in the team; experimentation seems random

Precious development resources are wasted on features that do not produce ROI

Marketers resort to experimentation using DOM manipulation tools to work around unresponsive development teams increasing the system’s overall complexity

There is a lack of product market fit

Shortening Cycle Time When Building Mobile and Web Apps

Shortening cycles requires implementing Lean/Agile processes across all parts of the organization that contribute to the software delivery. This can be challenging in complex organizations, but also offers the opportunity to build a common vision and trusting partnerships.

As non-IT stakeholders are exposed to the Lean processes, they will have the opportunity to see the value firsthand. In turn, they become essential participants in the prioritization of features based on the business value delivered that is required to build impactful products. Releasing the smallest possible initial feature set requires informed trade offs. This requires insights from many parts of the organization.

Often the business has invested in writing “a big spec”. The team can use it as a key reference, opposed to a task list, so that this investment is leveraged while avoiding a waterfall methodology and the associated slow downs and risks.

Analytics and developer team members benefit from working together early on in the project because it establishes a firmer understanding of what is meant by business success. Developers can also implement a better data collection design when they have a detailed understanding of the required metrics..

Individuals with compliance responsibilities can participate in standups and other Agile ceremonies. This allows for more proactive management and avoids significant delays.

Within the development team, practices that will shorten cycle time include:

Working software that is exercised by automated tests

Short sprints and small stories by breaking apart big stories into cohesive, related but independent smaller stories

Backlog prioritization decisions should be made in the context of hard data and trusted facts through the use of web and mobile analytics

Technology and architecture choices also play an important role in contracting cycles:

Separate the customer experience front-end from the transactional back-end by overlaying microservices on top of enterprise architecture

Use modern, cross-platform frameworks to accelerate simultaneous development of mobile and web applications

Establish a continuous delivery pipeline through the judicious implementation of modern DevOps, automated testing and deployment tools and containers

Demonstrate stability of continuous deployment on staging environments to pave the way for rapid production deployment

Correctly use feature toggles as a way of managing experiments, deploying canary releases and lightning-fast rollbacks

Target Flow

By reducing the Build-Measure-Learn cycle time, enterprises will benefit by:

Enabling the launch of new customer experiences quickly

Efficiently using of developer resources

Clear outcomes from experiments and the ability to react to learnings

In flight adjustments that maximize the impact of your product

More engaged customers and better product market fit

On time delivery

More productive, less stressed staff

Conclusion

Rolling feature releases have become the norm in consumer cloud services. When a new feature in a consumer product just shows up, no one is surprised and everything still works. The velocity, stability and data-driven decisions pioneered by companies like Facebook, Pinterest and LinkedIn can be adopted by enterprise IT.

We can help you guide your enterprise by starting with the Build-Measure-Learn Readiness Assessment and Roadmap.